Join Nomadic Press at Beast Crawl 2021 for a celebration of the many ways in which we howl into these dark nights.

Readings by Kemi Alabi (Graywolf Press), Stella Lei (The Augment Review), Taylor Byas (Soft Skull Press), Julio Montalvo Valentin (NightBallet Books), James Cagney (Nomadic Press), and Keith Donnell Jr. (Nomadic Press).

Taylor Byas is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was the 1st place winner of both the 2020 Poetry Super Highway and the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests, and a finalist for the 2020 Frontier OPEN Prize. She is the author of the chapbook Bloodwarm from Variant Lit, and her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in Spring of 2023. She is represented by Rena Rossner of The Deborah Harris Agency.

Book link: https://variantlit.com/product/bloodwarm/

Julio Montalvo Valentin (They/His/Julio) is the author of three chapbooks, the latest titled Those Who Pray to Rice (NightBallet Books , 2019). Julio is a member of the Latino/a/x arts collective called Los Artistas del Barrio Buffalo (LAdB) and a Teaching Artist at the Just Buffalo Literary Center. They have recently completed a month-long project as the Poetry Teaching Artist for the "Woke Words" summer enrichment program at P.S. 18, where the students also created a public poetry mural for the City of Buffalo, N.Y. You can find Julio talking about the politics of rice, working on his poetry caravan, or looking for the next reading/writing opportunity.

Link to the Book- http://nightballetpress.blogspot.com/.../those-who-pray...

Stella Lei's work is published or forthcoming in Four Way Review, Okay Donkey Magazine, trampset, and elsewhere. She is an Editor in Chief for The Augment Review, she has two cats, and she tweets @stellalei04. You can find more of her work at stellaleiwrites.weebly.com.

James Cagney is a writer from Oakland, Ca. Primarily a self taught poet, he is the author of two collections. His first, Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour of Chaos Theory, won the 2018 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. James’ second book, MARTIAN: The Saint Of Loneliness will be published by Nomadic Press in 2022. James is a Cave Canem Fellow. For more writing, visit TheDirtyRat.blog

Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory was first published by Nomadic Press in 2018. The second edition is being released by Nomadic Press on September 18, 2021 and is available for pre-order at

https://www.nomadicpress.org/.../blacksteelmagnoliasinthe....

Kemi Alabi was born on a Sunday in July. A Chicago-based writer and cultural strategist, Alabi is the author of Against Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, and coeditor of The Echoing Ida Collection (The Feminist Press, 2021). Their work has been published in the Atlantic, Poetry, Catapult, Best New Poets, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2, and elsewhere. Learn more at kemialabi.com.

Pre-order link for AGAINST HEAVEN:

https://bookshop.org/.../against-heaven-poems/9781644450826

Keith Donnell Jr. is a Philly-born, Bay Area-based poet and book editor. He earned his MA in English at the University of Southern California and his MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. He was a previous Editor-in-Chief of Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review and his work has appeared in journals and anthologies, most recently Puerto del Sol, Cagibi, Jubilat and Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in Seaside, California with his wife, Alivia, and two cats, Ember and Mika. The Move (Nomadic Press, 2021) is his first book, which you can pre-order at

https://www.nomadicpress.org/store/themove.